8:09 p.m. - 2003-11-16
Dr. Bruce's Checkered Past
Dr. Bruce wishes you to know...
...that Boston University is goofier than ever. The dictat... er, President John Silber may actually be gone now. BU just went through a very public freakout where they hired the former head of NASA, Dan Goldin, to be the new President but the day before he took office (!) the Board of Trustees asked him to go away, and gave him $1.3 million to do so. For those of you outside New England, John Silber is famous as the total nut absolute ruler of Boston University and has been for 32 years. He apparently has great difficulty going peaceably, which was unfortunately predictable. So the place is in an uproar, which makes me laugh. I spent a portion of my misguided youth there, studying math and economics when I wasn't busy throwing rocks at the Boston Police riot squad during various confrontations and disputes on campus. (I met Ruthie later, so I never exposed her to this brand of street fighting.)
Silber actually had some lasting influence on my world view and behavior. He publicly called us "short pants Communists" and "unsocialized juvenile primates". In truth, you just can't find that at most universities! And the man was born without the lower half of his right arm. A highlight of my sophomore year was getting into a shouting match with him in the middle of campus, with him sticking the knobby stump of his arm in my face for emphasis. Finally his bodyguards (yes, bodyguards) pushed people aside and escorted him away. Silber is always tough with his posse right behind him.
In more mundane news, I spent yesterday morning working a table for the Biology Department during one of the university's Campus Visit days for high school students. My display was a bunch of mussel shells from the Tennessee River and various parts of a longnose gar fish. Gars are really primitive fishes, with heavy bony scales and long, thin, toothy snouts. They're an ancient group of fishes whose fossil record goes back about 225 million years. So my table display had a dried gar head, the dried skin which is like bony chain mail, and a dish of their scales which are heavy bone about as big as your thumbnail. I was all set to impress potential biology majors, but it turns out almost this whole crew were wanna-be Computer Science majors. Only a few were up for talking about local river fauna, oh well...
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